Gotta say the warning signs were always there. Hype machine doesn't care about facts or real life consequence, it's cold and heartless that lifts games and devs only to crash them back to the ground.
Hello Games didn't deserve this, NMS should have released without all the shitstorm fanfair and grew organically over weeks and months.
Gamers should have realised that maybe we shouldn't hype this game up by a tiny group of people to a level that is normally reserved for the Bathesdas and EA's of the World. Now the perception of NMS is tainted.
Maybe the problem always was that this game appealed enormously to a lot of peop!e, who actually do love this game, but made other people wonder why they couldn't see the attraction and thus think there "had to be more to it"?
There wasn't, and it wasn't supposed to either.
NMS isn't a FPS, a story driven linear adventure game, a puzzle game, a Space sim, a RPG or a MMO. Never was going to be, except perhaps in the minds of many who just couldn't see what the hubbub was for that subset of people who were (and still are) excited at the idea to cross that next procedural horizon or hill, get to that next system with perhaps a slightly different planet and more elements to mine/ craft/ lore to reveal/ weird creatures to catalogue.
That is why even when it was rather clear what the game was going to be that we still had dozens of people askng what the game was about, if it was multiplayer, asking why guardians would prevent you from FPSing everything in sight on planets, and why there wasn't discussion trees.
I' m still not sure why NMS was burdened with the crux of being everything for everyone. Maybe the fans whose imagination was set ablaze by what they saw originally and ever since (and reading the OT these people, like me, enjoy the game tremendously) were "too" excited and made people not into Exploration/ Survival think there -had- to be more to it...
What I do know is that I am loving the game, that it is everything I was hoping it would be and then some (with a few rough patches to be sure, PC version and crashes notwithstanding), and that to this day (and probably will for a long time) I still wonder why No Man's Sky and Sean Murray were subjected to the kind of Vitriol we have seen in the past few days.
Many say it's about the Price. Or that Sean Murray is the new Peter Moyneux (and then putting out lists of missing features that, for whatI've seen) are more than 80% BS)...
Surely there has to be more to it than this.